WikiWorld

1. INVASION OF THE SHOREBIRDS

Thirty years worth of living, dumped out on the sidewalk, raw pickings for the nocturnal Street Gleaners tribe. Not literally yet, but it might just as well be—would be soon, given the damn rotten luck of Tug Gingerella. He was practically as dead as bananas. Extinct!

How was he going to manage this unwarranted, unexpected, inexorable eviction?

Goddamn greedy Godbout!

The space was nothing much. One small, well-used, five-room apartment in a building named The Wyandot. Bachelor’s digs, save for those three tumultuous years with Olive. Crates of books, his parents’ old Heywood-Wakefield furniture that he had inherited, cheaply framed but valuable vintage lobby poster featuring the happy image of Deanna Durbin warbling as Mary Poppins. Shabby clothes, mostly flannel and denim and Duofold, cargo shorts and Sandwich Island shirts; cast-iron cornbread skillets; favourite music on outmoded media: scratch slates, holo transects, grail packs, and their various stacked players, natch. Goodfaith Industries metal-topped kitchen table, Solace Army shelves, a painting by Karsh Swinehart (a storm-tossed sailboat just offshore from local Pleistocene Point, Turneresque by way of Thomas Cole).

All the beloved encumbering detritus of a life.

But a life lived to what purpose, fulfilling what early promise, juvenile dreams? All those years gone past so swiftly….

No. Maundering wouldn’t cut it. No remedies to his problems in fruitless recriminations and regrets. Best to hit the streets of Carrollboro in search of some aid and comfort.

Tug shuffled into a plaid lumberjacket, red-and-black Kewbie castoff that had wandered south across the nearby border like some migrating avian apparel and onto the Solace Army Store racks, took the two poutine-redolent flights down to ground level at a mild trot, energized by his spontaneous and uncharacteristic determination to act, and emerged onto Patrician Street, an incongruously named grand-dame-gone-shabby avenue cutting south and north through the Squirrel Hills district, and full of gloriously decaying sister buildings to The Wyandot, all built post-War, circa 1939: The Lewis and Jonathan, The Onondowaga, The Canandaigua, The Lord Fitzhugh, and half a dozen others.

Mid-October in Carrollboro: sunlight sharp as honed ice-skate blades, big irregularly gusting winds off Lake Ondiara, one of the five Grands. Sidewalks host to generally maintaining citizens, everyday contentment or focus evident, yet both attitudes tempered with the global stresses of the Big Retreat, ultimate source of Tug’s own malaise. (And yet, despite his unease, Tug invariably spared enough attention to appraise all the beautiful women—and they were all beautiful—fashionably bundled up just enough to tease at what was beneath.)

Normally Tug enjoyed the autumn season for its crisp air and sense of annual climax, prelude to all the big holidays. Samhain, Thanksgiving, the long festive stretch that began with Roger Williams’s birthday on December 21^st and extended through Christmas and La Fête des Rois….

But this year those nostalgia-inducing attractions paled, against the harsh background of his struggle to survive.

Patrician merged with Tinsley, a more commercial district. Here, shoppers mixed with browsers admiring the big gaudy windows at Zellers and the Bay department stores, even if they couldn’t make a purchase at the moment.

Carrollboro’s economy was convulsing and churning in weird ways, under the Big Retreat. Adding 10 percent more people to the city’s population of two-hundred-thousand had both boosted and dragged down the economy, in oddly emergent ways. The newcomers were a representatively apportioned assortment of rich, poor and middle-class refugees from all around the world, sent fleeing inland by the rising seas. “Shorebirds” all, yet differently grouped.

The poor, with their varied housing and medical and educational needs, were a drain on the federal and state government finances. They had settled mostly in the impoverished Swillburg and South Wedge districts of Carrollboro.

The skilled middle-class were undercutting wages and driving up unemployment rates, as they competed with the natives for jobs in their newly adopted region, and bought up single-family homes in Maplewood and Parkway.

And the rich—

The rich were driving longtime residents out of their unsecured rentals, as avaricious owners, seeking big returns on their investments, went luxury condo with their properties.

Properties like The Wyandot, owned by Narcisse Godbout.

Thoughts of his heinous landlord fired Tug up and made him quicken his pace.

Maybe Pavel would have some ideas that could help.

2. OCARINA CITY

Just a few blocks away from the intersection of Tinsley with Grousebeck, site of the Little Theatre and Tug’s destination, Tug paused before Dr. Zelda’s Ocarina Warehouse, the city’s biggest retailer of fipple flutes.

Carrollboro had been known as Ocarina City ever since the late 1800s.

The connection between metropolis and instrument began by chance in the winter of 1860, when an itinerant pedlar named Leander Watts passed through what was then a small town of some five-thousand inhabitants, bearing an unwanted crate full of Donati “Little Goose” fipple flutes, which Watts had grudgingly accepted in Manhattan in lieu of cash owed for some other goods. But thanks to his superb salesmanship, Watts was able to unload on the citizens of Carrollboro the whole consignment of what he regarded as useless geegaws.

In their hiemal isolation and recreational desperation, the citizens of Carrollboro had latched onto the little ceramic flutes, and by spring thaw the city numbered many self-taught journeymen and master players among the populace.

From Carrollboro the fascination with ocarinas had spread nationally, spiking and dying away and spiking again over the subsequent decades, although never with such fervour as at the epicentre. There, factories and academies and music-publishing firms and cafes and concert halls and retail establishments had sprung up in abundance, lending the city its nickname and music-besotted culture.

Today the window of Dr. Zelda’s held atop russet velvet cushions the Fall 2010 models from Abimbola, von Storch, Tater Innovator, Xun Fun, Charalambos, and many other makers. There were small pendant models, big two-handed transverse models, and the mammoth three-chambered types. Materials ranged from traditional ceramics to modern polycarbonates, and the surface decorations represented an eye-popping decorative range from name designers as varied as Fairey, Schorr and Mars.

Piped from outdoor speakers above the doorway came the latest ocarina hit, debuting on the Billboard charts at Number Ten, a duet from Devandra Banhart and Jack Johnson, “World Next Door.”

Tug himself was a ham-fingered player at best. But his lack of skill did not deter his covetous admiration of the display of instruments. But after some few minutes of day-dreaming fascination, he turned away like a bum from a banquet.

Simply another thing he couldn’t afford just now.

3. UNPLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

The Art Vrille movement that had swept the globe in the 1920s and 1930s had left behind several structures in Carrollboro, not the least of which was the Little Theatre. An ornate music-box of a structure, it had plainly seen better days, with crumbling stucco ornaments, plywood replacement of lapidary, enamelled tin panels, and a marquee with half its rim’s lightbulbs currently missing.

Today, according to that marquee, the Little Theatre was running a matinee in one of its four rooms, subdivided from the original palace-like interior: a double feature consisting of Diana Dors in The Girl Can’t Help It and Doris Day in Gun Crazy. Tug had seen both films many times before, and was glad he wasn’t the projectionist for them. Tonight, though, he anticipated his duty: screening the first-run release of Will Eisner’s The Spirit. Early reviews had Brendan Fraser nailing the role.

Tug tracked down Pavel Bilodeau in the manager’s office.

The short, mid-thirty-ish fellow—casually dressed, blond hair perpetually hayricked, plump face wearing its default expression of an elementary school student subjected to a pop quiz on material unmastered—was busy behind his desktop ordinateur, fingers waltzing across the numerical keypad to the right of the alpha keys. Spotting his unexpected visitor, Pavel said, “Right with you, Tug.” He triggered output from the noisy o-telex (its carriage chain needed oiling), got up, burst and shuffled together the fanfold printout, and approached Tug.

“This is a spreadsheet of the Little Theatre’s finances, Tug.”

Tug got a bad feeling from Pavel’s tone. Or rather, Tug’s recently omnipresent bad feeling deepened. “Yeah?”

“Receipts are down—way down. I’ve got to cut costs if I want to keep this place open.”

“I read about this cheap butter substitute for the popcorn concession—”

“I need bigger savings, Tug. Like your salary.”

“I’m being fired?”

Pavel had the grace to look genuinely miserable. “Laid off. Starting today. You can collect.”

Tug sank into a chair like a used-car-lot Air Dancer deprived of its fan. “But I was coming here to ask for more hours—and if you had found any leads on a place for me to stay.”

Pavel clapped a hand on Tug’s shoulder. “You know the worst now, Tug.”

Regarding his newly-ex employer, Tug suddenly realized the gap of years between them, over two decades’ worth. Pavel looked incredibly young and callow—like the growing majority of people Tug encountered lately. Kids! They were all kids these days! He tried not to let his resentment of Pavel’s relative youth and prospects surface in his voice.

“But how will you run the place without me? Dave and Jeff can’t work round-the-clock on four machines.”

“I’m installing automated digital projectors. The new Cinemeccanica o-500’s. No more film. It’s a bit of a capital investment, but it’ll pay off quickly. Jeff will handle days, and Dave nights. They’ll have to take a pay cut too. Together after the cut, they’ll still make less than you do now. They’re young and inexperienced, so they won’t mind so much. Oh, and shipping charges on the rentals come down dramatically too. The files get transmitted over CERN-space.”

“I’ll take the pay cut!”

“No, Tug, I think this is best. You wouldn’t be happy just pressing virtual buttons on a monitor screen. You’re too old-school. You’re filaments and sprockets and triacetate, not bits and bytes and command language strings.”

Tug wanted to voice more objections, to protest that he could change—but a sudden realization stilled his tongue.

What Pavel said was true. His age and attitudes had caught up with him. If he couldn’t manually load the reels of film and enjoy guiding their smooth progress through the old machines for the enjoyment of the audience, he would feel useless and unfulfilled. The new technology was too sterile for him.

Tug got wearily to his feet. “All right, if that’s how it’s gotta be. Do I dare ask if you stumbled on any housing leads?”

“No, I haven’t. It’s incredible. The shorebirds have totally deranged the rental landscape. But listen, here’s what I can offer. You can store all your stuff in the basement here for as long as you want.”

The basement of the Little Theatre was a huge labyrinth of unused storage space, save for some ancient props from the days of the live-performer Salmagundi Circuit.

“Okay, that’s better than nothing. Thanks for all the years of employment, Pavel. The Little Theatre always felt like my second home.”

“Just think of it as leaving the nest at last, Tug. It’s gonna work out fine. Bigger and better things ahead.”

Tug wished he could be as optimistic as Pavel, but right this minute he felt lower than Carole Lombard’s morals in Baby Face.

4. TRASH PLATTER CHATTER

Hangdogging his way through the lobby, Tug ran into the Little Theatre’s lone janitor and custodian.

Pieter van Tuyll van Serooskerken was a Dikelander. Like a surprisingly uniform number of his countrymen and countrywomen, Pieter was astonishingly tall and fair-skinned. In the average crowd of native brunette and ruddy-faced Carrollborovians, he resembled a stalk of white asparagus set amid a handful of radishes. Today, alone in the lobby and leaning daydreamily on his broom, he seemed like a lone droopy stalk tethered to a supportive stake.

Pieter’s native country had been one of the first to collapse under the rising oceans. Dikeland now existed mostly underwater, its government in exile, its citizens dispersed across the planet. The Dikelanders were among the longest-settled Big Retreat immigrants in Carrollboro and elsewhere in the USA, hardly considered an exotic novelty any longer.

Back home, Pieter had been a doctor. Informed, upon relocation to America, of the long, tedious bureaucratic process necessary to requalify, he had opted out of the prestigious field, although still young, hale and optimally productive. Tug suspected that Pieter’s discovery of Sal-D, or Ska Pastora, had contributed to his career change. Blissfully high throughout much of each day and night on quantities of Shepherdess that would turn a novice user’s brain to guava jelly, Pieter found janitorial work more his speed.

With a paradoxically languid and unfocused acuity, Pieter now unfolded himself and hailed Tug.

“Hey, Ginger Ale.”

Pieter, in his perfect, nearly accentless yet still oddly alien English, was the only person who ever called Tug Gingerella by that nickname. The Dikelander seemed to derive immense absurdist humour from it.

“Hey, Pete. What’s new?”

“I have almost gotten ‘Radar Love’ down. Apex of Dikelander hillbilly-skiffle music. Wanna hear?”

Pieter drew a pendant ocarina from beneath his work vest and began to raise it to his lips.

“Naw, Pete, I’m just not in the mood right now.”

“How is that?”

Tug explained all his troubles, starting with his eviction and culminating in his dismissal from the Little Theatre.

Pieter seemed truly moved. “Aw, man, that sucks so bad. Listen, we approach lunchtime. Let me treat you to a trash platter, and we can talk things through.”

Tug began perforce to salivate at the mention of the Carrollboro gastronomic speciality. “Okay, that’s swell of you, Pete.”

“So long as I still possess a paycheque, why not?”

Pieter stood his broom up in a corner with loving precision, found a coat in the cloakroom—not necessarily his own, judging by the misfit, Tug guessed—and led the way five blocks south to the Hatch Suit Nook.

The clean and simple proletarian ambiance of the big diner instantly soothed Tug’s nerves. Established nearly a century ago, the place ranked high in Carrollboro traditions. Tug had been dining here since childhood. (Thoughts of his departed folks engendered a momentary sweet yet faded sorrow, but then the enzymatic call of his stomach overpowered the old emotions.) Amidst the jolly noise of the customers, Tug and Pieter found seats at the counter.

Composing one’s trash platter was an art. The dish consisted of the eater’s choice of cheeseburger, hamburger, red hots, white hots, Italian sausage, chicken tender, haddock, fried ham, grilled cheese, or eggs; and two sides of either home fries, French fries, baked beans, or macaroni salad. Atop the whole toothsome farrago could be deposited mustard, onions, ketchup, and a proprietary greasy hot sauce of heavily spiced ground beef. The finishing touch: Italian toast.

Pieter and Tug ordered. While they were waiting, Pieter took out his pipe. Tug was appalled.

“You’re not going to smoke that here, are you?”

“Why not? The practice is perfectly legal.”

“But you’ll give everyone around us a contact high.”

“Nobody cares but you, Ginger Ale. And if they do, they can move off. This helps me think. And your fix demands a lot of thinking.”

Pieter fired up and, as he predicted, no neighbours objected. But they were all younger than Tug. Another sign of his antiquity, he supposed.

After a few puffs of Shepherdess, Pieter said, “You could come live with me.”

Pieter lived with two women, Georgia and Carolina, commonly referred to as “The Dixie Twins,” although they were unrelated, looked nothing alike, and hailed from Massachusetts. Tug had never precisely parsed the exact relations among the trio, and suspected that Pieter and the Dixie Twins themselves would have been hard-pressed to define their menage.

“Again, that’s real generous of you, Pete. But I don’t think I’d be comfortable freeloading in your apartment.”

Pieter shrugged. “Your call.”

The trash platters arrived then, and further discussion awaited whole-hearted ingestion of the jumbled mock-garbage ambrosia….

Pieter wiped his grease-smeared face with a paper napkin and took up his smouldering pipe from the built-in countertop ashtray. Sated, Tub performed his own ablutions. A good meal was a temporary buttress against all misfortunes….

“Maybe you could live with Olive.”

Tug’s ease instantly evaporated, to be replaced by a crimson mélange of guilt, frustration, anger and shame: the standard emotional recipe for his post-breakup dealings with Olive Ridley.

“That—that is not a viable idea, Pete. I’m sorry, it’s just not.”

“You and Olive had a lot going for you. Everybody said so.”

“Yeah, we had almost as much going for us as we had against. There’s no way I’m going to ask her for any charity.”

Pete issued hallucinogenic smoke rings toward the diner’s ceiling. His eyes assumed a glazed opacity lucid with reflections of a sourceless starlight.

“Tom Pudding.”

Tug scanned the menu board posted above the grille. “Is that a dessert? I don’t see—”

Pieter jabbed Tug in the chest with the stem of his pipe. “Wake up! The Tom Pudding. It’s a boat. An old canal barge, anchored on the Attawandaron. People are using it as a squat. Some guy named Vasterling runs it. He fixed it all up. Supposed to be real nice.”

Tug pondered the possibilities. A radical recasting of his existence, new people, new circumstances…. Life on a houseboat, rent-free. The romantic, history-soaked vista of the Attawandaron Canal. Currier & Ives engravings of grassy towpath, overhanging willow trees, merry bargemen singing as they hefted bales and crates—

“I’ll do it! Thanks, Pete!”

But Pieter had already lost interest in Tug and his plight, the Dikelander’s Shepherdess-transmogrified proleptic attention directed elsewhere. “Yeah, cool, great.”

Tug helped his hazey-dazey friend stand and don his coat. They headed toward the exit.

Pieter stopped suddenly short and goggled in amazement at nothing visible to Tug. Other customers strained to see whatever had so potently transfixed the Dikelander.

“A Nubian! I see a Nubian princess! She’s here, here in Carrollboro!”

“A Nubian princess? You mean, like a black woman? From Africa?”

“Yes!”

Tug scratched his head. “What would a black woman be doing in Carrollboro? I’ve never seen one here in my whole life, have you?”

5. MOVING DAY MORN

After his impulsive decision at the Hatch Suit Nook—a decision to abandon all his old ways for a footloose lifestyle—Tug had nervous second thoughts. So in the two weeks left until his scheduled eviction on November first, he searched for a new job. But the surge of competing talented shorebirds made slots sparse.

Tug’s best chance, he thought, had come at the Aristo Nodak Company. That large, long-established national firm, purveyor of all things photographic, ran a film archive and theatre, mounting retrospective festivals of classic features, everything from Hollywood spectacles such as Elizabeth Taylor’s Salammbô to indie productions like Carolee Schneemann’s avant-garde home movies of the 1960s, featuring her hillbilly-skiffle-playing husband John Lennon. With their emphasis on old-school materials, there’d be no nonsense about Cinemeccanica o-500’s. But despite a sympathetic and well-carried interview, Tug had come in second for the lone projectionist job to a Brit shorebird who had worked for the drowned Elstree Studios.

Despondent at the first rejection, Tug had immediately quit looking. That was how he always reacted, he ruefully acknowledged. One blow, and he was down for the count. Take his only serious adult romantic relationship, with Olive. The disintegration of that affair a few years ago had left him entirely hors de combat on the fields of Venus.

But what could he do now about this fatal trait? He was too damn old to change….

Tug didn’t own a fancy o-phone or even a cheap laptop ordinateur. The hard drive on his old desktop model had cratered a year ago, and he had been too broke to replace the machine. Consequently, he used a local o-café, The Happy Applet, to manage his sparse o-mail and to surf CERN-space. A week before his scheduled eviction, he went to Craig’s List and posted a plea for help with getting his possessions over to the Little Theatre. Too proud and ashamed to approach his friends directly, Tug hoped that at least one or two people would show up.

Far from that meagre attendance, he got a massive turnout.

The morning of October 31^st dawned bright, crisp and white as Jack Frost’s bedsheets, thanks to an early dusting of snow. (The altered climate had pushed the typical wintry autumn weather of Tug’s youth back into December, and he regarded this rare October snow, however transitory, as a good omen.) After abandoning his futile job search, Tug had furiously boxed all his treasured possessions, donating quite a bit to Goodfaith Industries. Handling all the accumulated wrack of thirty years left him simultaneously depressed and nostalgic. He had set aside a smattering of essential clothes, toiletries and touchstones, stuffing them all into a beat-up North Face backpack resurrected from deep within a closet, token of his quondam affiliation with a hiking club out near Palmyra.

At six A.M. he sat on a box at a window looking down at Patrician Street, backpack nestled between his feet, sipping a takeout coffee. An hour later, just when he had prematurely convinced himself no one was coming, the caravan arrived: miscellaneous trucks and cars to the number of a dozen. Out of them tumbled sleepy-eyed friends, acquaintances and strangers.

Jeff, Dave, Pavel and Pieter from the Little Theatre. Tug’s second cousin, Nick, all the way from Bisonville. Brenda and Irene, baristas from The Happy Applet. Those nerdy guys with whom for a few years he had traded holo transects of rare Salmagundi Circuit novelty tunes. The kid who sold him his deli lunch each day and who had had an obsession with Helen Gahagan ever since Tug had introduced the kid to her performance in The Girl in the Golden Atom. And others, of deeper or shallower intimacy.

Including—yes, that fireplug of a figure was indeed Olive Ridley.

6. OLD HABITS DIE HARD

Tug hastened down the stairs, and was greeted with loud acclamations. Smiling broadly yet a bit nervously at this unexpected testament to his social connectivity, he nodded to Olive but made no big deal of her presence. Someone pressed a jelly doughnut and a fresh coffee into his hands, and he scarfed them down. Then the exodus began in earnest.

The first sweaty shuttling delivered nearly half his stuff to the basement of the old movie palace. Then came a refreshment break, with everyone gently ribbing Tug about this sea-change in his staid life, and subtly expressing their concern for his future, expressions he made light of, despite his own doubts. The second transfer netted everything out of the melancholy, gone-ghostly apartment except about a dozen small boxes. These were loaded into a single car. Sandwiches and pizza and drinks made the rounds, and a final salvo of noontide farewells.

Then Tug was left alone with Olive, whose car, he finally realized, bore the last of his freight.

But before he could expostulate, Narcisse Godbout arrived on the scene in his battered Burroughs Econoline van.

Born some seventy years ago in Montreal, the fat, grizzled, foul-mouthed Kewbie wore his usual crappy cardigan over flannel shirt, stained grey wool pants and scuffed brogans. Although resident in Carrollboro for longer than his Montreal upbringing, he had never lost his accent. For thirty years he had been Tug’s landlord, a semi-distant albeit intermittently thorny source of irritation. Godbout’s reasonable rents had been counterbalanced by his sloth, derision and ham-handed repairs. To preserve his below-market rent, Tug had always been forced to placate and curry the man’s curmudgeonly opinions. And now, of course, with his decision to evict Tug, Godbout had shifted the balance of his reputation to that of extremely inutile slime.

“You got dose fucking keys, eh, Gingerella?”

Tug experienced a wave of violent humiliation, the culmination of three decades of kowtowing and forelock-tugging. He dug the apartment keys from his pocket and threw them at Godbout’s feet into the slush. Then Tug summoned up the worst insult he could imagine.

“You—you latifundian!”

Yes, it fit. Like some peon labouring without rights or privileges for the high-hatted owner of some Brazilian plantation, Tug had been subservient to the economic might of this property-owner for too long. But now he was free!

Tug’s brilliant insult, however, failed to register with Godbout or faze the ignorant fellow. Grunting, he stooped for the keys, and for a moment Tug expected him to have a heart attack. But such perfect justice was not in the cards. An unrepentant Godbout merely said, “Now I get a better class of tenant, me. Good goddamn riddance to all you boho dogshits.”

The landlord drove off before Tug could formulate a comeback.

Leaving Tug once again alone with Olive.

Short and stout and a few years younger than Tug, Olive Ridley favoured unadorned smock dresses in various dull colours of a burlap-type fabric Tug had never seen elsewhere, at least outside of barnyard settings, complemented by woolly tights of paradoxically vivid hues and ballet-slipper flats. She wore her long grey-flecked black hair in a single braid thick as a hawser. Her large plastic-framed glasses lent her face an owlish aspect.

Tug and Olive had met and bonded over their love of vintage postcards, bumping into each other at an ephemera convention, chatting tentatively, then adjourning for a coffee at a nearby branch of Seattle’s ubiquitous Il Giornale chain. Subsequent outings found them exploring a host of other mutual interests: from movies, of course, through the vocal stylings of the elderly Hank Williams. Their middle-aged, cool-blooded romance, such as it was, progressed through retrospectively definable stages of intimacy until moving in together seemed inevitable.

But cohabitation disclosed a plethora of intractable quirks, crotchets, demands and minor vices held by both partners, fossilized abrasive behaviour patterns that rendered each lover unfit for long-term proximity—at least with each other.

Three years after putting her collection of Felix the Cat figurines—including the ultra-rare one depicting Felix with Fowlton Means’s Waldo—on Tug’s shelves, Olive was tearfully shrouding them in bubblewrap.

Despite this heavy history, Tug vowed now to deal with Olive with neutral respect. She had worked hard all morning to help him move, and now obviously sought some kind of rapprochement.

Olive’s words bore out Tug’s intuition.

“I wanted to have some time for just us, Tug. I thought we could grab some ice cream at Don’s Original, and talk a little.”

Don’s Original had been their favourite place as a couple. Tug was touched.

“That—that’s very kind of you, Olive. Let’s go.” Tug tossed his pack in the car, and climbed in.

The drive to Culver Road took only a few minutes. (With no car of his own, Tug felt weird to be transiting the city in this unaccustomed fashion.) They mostly spoke of the inarguable: what a Grade-A jerk Narcisse Godbout had unsurprisingly proved himself to be.

Inside Don’s, Tug and Olive both paused for a sentimental moment in front of the Banana Split Memorial. Fashioned of realistic-looking moulded and coloured silicone, like faux sushi, the dusty monument never failed to bring a sniffle to any viewer of a certain age.

Forty years ago, the beloved and familiar Cavendish banana—big creamy delicious golden-skinned monocultured artefact of mankind’s breeding genius—had gone irrevocably extinct, victim of the triple-threat of Tropical Race 4, Black Sigatoka, and Banana Bunchy Top Virus. In the intervening decades, alternative cultivars had been brought to market. Feeble, tiny, ugly, drab, and starchy as their plantain cousin, these banana substitutes had met with universal disdain from consumers, who recalled the unduplicatable delights of the Cavendish.

Tug’s own childhood memories of banana-eating were as vivid as any of his peers’. How thoughtlessly and gluttonously they had gorged on the fruit, little anticipating its demise! Sometimes after all these years of abstinence he believed he could not recall the exact taste of a banana. Yet at other unpredictable moments, his mouth flooded with the familiar taste.

But this particular moment, despite the proximity of the banana simulacrum, did not provide any such Proustian occasion.

Tug and Olive found a booth, ordered sundaes, and sat silent for a moment, before Olive asked, “Tug, precisely what are you doing with yourself?”

“I—I don’t know exactly. I’m just trying to go with the flow.”

“Squatting with a bunch of strangers—yes, Pete told me about it—is not exactly a long-term plan.”

“I’m thinking… maybe I can write now. Now that I’ve shed everything that kept me down. You know I’ve always wanted to write. About movies, music, my everyday life—”

Olive’s look of disgust recalled too many similar, rankling moments of harsh condemnation, and Tug had to suppress an immediate tart rejoinder.

“Oh, Tug, you could have written at any time in the past twenty years. But you let those early rejections get to you, and you just caved in and gave up.”

Unspeaking, Tug poked pensively and peevishly at his melting ice cream. Then he said, “Can you drop me off in Henrietta? I’ve got to find the Tom Pudding.”

7. IN PURSUIT OF THE TOM PUDDING

At its inception the Attawandaron Canal had stretched unbroken for nearly four hundred miles, from Beverwyck on the Hudson River, the state’s capital, all the way to Bisonville on the shores of Lake Attawandaron, another of the Grands. Constructed in the mid-1800s during the two terms of President Daniel Webster, the Canal had been an engineering wonder, and came to occupy a massive place in American history books, having opened up the Midwest to commerce with the established East, and also generated an immense folklore, still fondly recalled. The Canal Monster, Michel Phinckx, Sam Patch, and other archetypes. Bypassed now by other modes of transport, chopped by development into long and short segments, the old Canal had become a recreational resource and prominent talismanic presence in Carrollboro and environs.

Tug had chosen the Henrietta district as a likely starting point for his search for the Tom Pudding. Beginning at Carrollboro’s city lines where the Canal entered town, he would follow its riverine length until he encountered the utopic loafer’s haven limned by Pete.

Tug waved goodbye to Olive’s dwindling rear-view mirror, shouldered his pack, and looked at the westering sun. Their trip to the Little Theatre to drop off Tug’s last load of stuff had chewed up more time. Now he had barely a few hours before frosty autumnal dusk descended. No plans for how to spend the night. Better get moving.

Tug’s earlier whimsy of inhabiting a vanished Currier & Ives era intermittently materialized as he began to hike the Canal. Stretches of the original towpath, paved or not, served as a bike and pedestrian trail, alongside the somnolent unworking waters channelled between meticulously joined stone walls, labour of a thousand anonymous Irish and Krakówvian workers. The mechanisms of the old locks hulked like rusted automatons. The whole scene radiated a melancholy desuetude most pleasing to Tug. Something older even than him, yet still useful in its decrepit fashion.

Of course, at other points the Canal fought with modernity—and lost. It vanished under grafittied bridges or potholed pavement, was pinched between ominous warehouses, parallelled by gritty train tracks: a Blakean straitened undine.

Tug was brought up short at one point as the Canal slipped liquidly beneath a razor-wire-topped fence surrounding an extensive auto junkyard. Furious big dogs hurled themselves at the chainlink, bowing it outward and causing Tug to stumble backwards. He worked his way around the junkyard by gritty alleys and continued on.

By ten P.M. exhaustion had set in. The neighbourhood around him held no familiar landmarks, a part of Carrollboro unvisited by Tug before, despite his long tenure in the city. He found a Tim Horton’s open all night, bought a coffee and doughnut as requisite for occupying a booth unmolested by the help. But the desultory kids behind the counter cared little about his tenancy anyhow. He drowsed on and off, dreaming of a Narcisse Godbout big as a mountain, up whose damp woollen flank Tug had to scrabble.

In the morning, he performed some rudimentary ablutions in the doughnut shop rest room, his mouth tasting like post-digested but pre-processed civet-cat coffee beans. Then he went on hunting the elusive barge full of slackers.

He made it all the way out past Greece Canal Park to Spencerport, before deciding that it was unlikely for the Tom Pudding to be berthed further away. Then he turned around and began wearily to retrace his steps, following the fragments of the Attawandaron Canal as if he were Hansel lacking a Gretel, seeking a way home.

Luckily that day featured pleasant weather. Tug had a pocket full of cash, his first unemployment money, so he was able to eat well. He even took a shower at Carrollboro’s downtown branch of the Medicine Lodge, changed his underwear, and dozed in the kiva chapel with some winos, despite the shaman’s chants and the rattle of his gourds.

Tug extended his search beyond Henrietta. No luck. He spent the night in another Tim Horton’s, emerging smelling like a stale cruller.

Eliminating the unlikely distal regions, the third day saw him repeat the whole central portion of his fruitless quest, traversing every accessible inch of the Canal without seeing so much as the Tom Pudding’s oil slick.

When dusk arrived, Tug found himself at the edge of the sprawling park adjacent to the University of Carrollboro in the city’s centre, one hundred acres of path-laced greenery, wild as Nature intended in spots.

Slumped against a foliage-rich oak tree atop a dry carpet of last year’s leaves (trees stayed seasonally green longer these days), Tug polished off a can of Coke. Dispirited and enervated, he mused on this latest failure.

Why hadn’t he gotten Pete to nail down the location of the Tom Pudding? If the place was unknown, he should have discarded the option, despite its romantic allure. But having chosen to search, why couldn’t he accomplish this simple task? It was as if the world always turned a cold shoulder to him. Why couldn’t he ingratiate himself with anyone? Was he too prickly, too proud? Would he die a bitter, lonely, unrequited fellow?

Tug’s thoughts turned to a wordless pall along with the descent of darkness. He stewed for several hours.

Then lilting ocarina music infiltrated his blue funk.

Tug had heard ocarina music intermittently for the past three days: from street musicians, lunchtime amateurs, kids in playgrounds, commercial loudspeakers. Fipple flute music provided the background buzz of Ocarina City, and he mostly paid little attention to it.

But he had never heard an ocarina sound like this. The music conjured up vivid pictures of foreign locales, an almost sensory buzz.

From out the bushes of the park emerged a dim figure, source of the strangely gorgeous sounds. Tug strained his eyes—

He saw Pete’s Nubian Princess.

The black woman was bundled up against the cold in a crazyquilt assortment of shawls and scarves. Tug suspected the patterned garments would be gaudy and colourful by day. Lithe, tall, thin, she moved like a swaying giraffe. Her indistinctly perceived facial features seemed more Arabic or Semitic than Negroid. Her hair was a dandelion explosion.

She stopped a few yards away from Tug and continued to play, a haunting melody unfamiliar to the man.

Tug got to his feet. What were the odds he’d encounter such an exotic creature, given that the whole of North America hosted perhaps only ten thousand Africans at any given moment, and those mostly diplomats and businessmen? Could she be a foreign student attending Carrollboro’s University? Unlikely, given the prestige of schools in Songhai, Kanen-Bornu and the Oyo Empire. Nor was it likely she’d be a shorebird, given that Africa’s displaced coastal citizens had all been taken care of at home.

Tug took a step toward the outré apparition. The woman ceased playing, smiled (teeth very white against dark skin), turned, then resumed playing and began to walk into the undergrowth.

Tug could do nothing but follow. Had not an ounce of will left otherwise.

Deeper into the park she led him. Tug could smell water. But not the semi-stagnant Canal water. Fresh, running water. He realized that they must be approaching the Cunhestiyuh River as it cut through the park and city.

Sure enough, they were soon at its banks, and could not cross. The woman led the way leftward along the shore until they reached a line of thick growth perpendicular to the river. Employing a non-obvious gap amidst the trees and bushes, she stepped through, Tug just steps behind.

No more ocarina music, and the woman had vanished.

Tug became more aware of his surroundings, as if awaking from a dream.

He stood on the edge of an artificial embankment. He suddenly realized the nature of the spot.

The Attawandaron Canal had been connected to the Cunhestiyuh River at intervals by short feeder canals, to refresh its flow. This was one such. A leaky yet still mostly functioning feedgate on the riverside was still in place, barring ingress of the River and making for a low water level in the feeder chute. Entering the Canal on the opposite side from the towpath, this feeder inlet, perhaps overgrown on its far end too, had been totally overlooked by Tug in his quest.

Tug looked down.

Nearly filling the narrow channel, the Tom Pudding floated below, lit up like an Oktoberfest beer garden with coloured fairy lights, its deck busy with people. A ladder ran from the top of the feeder canal on down to the barge’s broad roof.

A fair-haired man looked up then and spotted Tug. The man said, “Pellenera’s brought us another one. Hey, pal, c’mon down!”

8. VASTERLING’S MAD AND MARVELLOUS MENAGERIE

The planning and rehearsing for the quantum physics chautauqua were complete. A vote among the barge’s citizens had affixed the title of “Mystery Mother and Her Magic Membranes” onto the production, passing over such contenders as “The Heterotic Revue;” “Branes! Branes! Escape from the Zombie Universe;” “I’ve Got the Worlds on a String;” and “Witten It Be Nice? Some Good Sub-Planckian Vibrations.”

The one and only performance of the educational saturnalia was scheduled for this very night, at the Carrollboro venue that generally hosted visiting chautauquas, the Keith Vawter Memorial Auditorium. Franchot Galliard had paid for the rental of the space, reluctantly tapping into his deep family fortunes, despite an inherent miserliness that had caused him, about four years previously, to purchase the Tom Pudding at scrapyard prices and take up residence aboard, whilst leasing out his Ellwanger Barry-district mansion at exorbitant rates to rich shorebirds.

Oswaldo Vasterling was just that persuasive.

The young visionary self-appointed captain of the permanently-moored barge full of oddballs could have herded cats into a swimming pool, Tug believed. Short and roly-poly, his complexion a diluted Mediterranean olive hue, the stone-faced twenty-one-year-old struck most first-time interlocutors as unprepossessing in the extreme. (Tug suspected a bit of Asperger’s, affected or otherwise, in Vasterling’s character.)

Gorm Vasterling, Oswaldo’s dad, had been an unmarried Dikelander resident in Fourierist Russia, an agriculture specialist. When the Omniarch of the Kiev Phalanx ordered Gorm to transplant his talents to Cuba, to aid the Fourierist brethren there, Gorm instantly obeyed.

Upon relocation to Cuba, Gorm’s Dikelander genes almost immediately combined with the Latina genes of Ximena Alcaron, a Fourier Passionologist specializing in Animic Rehabilitation. The result was a stubby, incipiently mustachioed child who had received the least appealing somatic traits of each parent.

But in brainpower, little Oswaldo was not scanted.

Some three years ago, in 2007, at age eighteen, educationally accelerated Oswaldo was already doing post-doc work in M-theory with Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a semi-independent think-tank headquartered on the campus of Carrollboro U. But Smolin and his star student had clashed violently over some abstruse quantum heresy, and Oswaldo Vasterling had been cast out from the sanctum.

He hadn’t gone far, though, ending up just a mile or so away from the campus, serendipitously stumbling upon Franchot Galliard’s welcoming barge. There, he commandeered several rooms as his lab-cum-sleeping quarters and set up a rococo experimental apparatus resembling the mutant offspring of a Portajohn and a digital harmonium, attached to a small-scale radio-telescope, a gravity-wave interferometer, and a bank of networked ordinateurs, the whole intended to replicate what he had left behind at the PITP.

Forever short of money for his unperfected equipment, he perpetually harrassed the stingy Galliard for dough, generally with little success, and inveigled everyone else onboard to participate in money-raising schemes, of which the chautauqua was the latest. (The city had been plastered with advertisements, both wheat-pasted and CERN-spaced, and if Oswaldo’s show filled half of Vawter’s seats with paying customers, he’d net a hefty sum—especially since all the performers were volunteers.)

But the mixed-media performance also stood as Oswaldo’s intended refutation of his ex-comrades at the PITP. He had invited them all to witness his theories rendered in music and dance, light and sound, hoping they would repent and acknowledge the Vasterling genius. And his quondam colleagues had accepted en masse, in the spirit of those anticipating a good intellectual brawl.

Tug’s part in this affair? He had been placed in charge of stage lighting, on the crack-brained logic that he had worked before with machines that projected light. Luckily, the boards at the Vawter were old-fashioned, non-o consoles, and Tug had mastered them easily in a few rehearsals, leaving him confident he could do his part to bring off “Mystery Mother and Her Magic Membranes” successfully.

So in the hours remaining before showtime, Tug had little to do save hang out with Sukey Damariscotta. He looked for her now.

The vast open cargo interior of the old decommissioned barge had been transformed over the past four years into a jerry-built, multi-level warren of sleeping, dining, working and recreational spaces by the resident amateur carpenters (and by one former professional, the surly alcoholic Don Rippey, who managed just barely to ensure that every load-bearing structure met minimal standards for non-collapse, that the stolen electricity was not fed directly into, say, the entire hull, and that the equally purloined plumbing did not mix inflow with outflow). Consequently, there were no straight paths among the quarters, and finding anyone involved something just short of solving the Travelling Voyageur problem.

If the layout of the Tom Pudding remained still obscure to Tug even after a month’s habitation, he felt he finally had a pretty good fix on most of the recomplicated interpersonal topography of the barge. But initially, that feature too had presented an opaque façade.

Hailed from the barge that night of discovery, Tug had descended the ladder into a clamourous reception from a few dozen curious strangers. Supplied, sans questioning, with a meal, several stiff drinks and a bunk, he had fallen straight asleep.

In the morning, Tug stumbled upon the same fellow who had first spotted him. Brewing coffee, the ruggedly handsome guy introduced himself as Harmon Frawley. Younger than Tug by a decade or more, boyish beyond his years, Frawley had been an ad copywriter in Toronto until a painful divorce, after which he had gone footloose and impoverishedly free. He still favoured his old wardrobe of Brooks Brothers shirts and trousers, but they were getting mighty beat.

Sipping coffee and running a big hand through his blond bangs, Harmon explained the origin, ethos and crew of the Tom Pudding to Tug.

“So Galliard owns this floating commune, but Vasterling is the boss?”

“Right. Insofar as anyone is. Call Ozzie the ‘Prime Mover’ if you need a more accurate title. Frankie just wants to be left alone with his collection.”

When Tug eventually met Franchot Galliard, he was instantly reminded of Adolphe Menjou in his starring role in Where the Blue Begins, lugubrious canine makeup and all. Galliard’s penchant for antique eight-millimetre stag films, especially those starring the young Nancy Davis, struck Tug as somewhat unhealthy, and he was glad the rich collector knew how to operate his own projector. Still, who was he to criticize any man’s passion?

“And he doesn’t care who crashes here?”

“Not at all! So long as it doesn’t cost him anything. But you know, not many people find us here. And even the ones who do don’t always stay. The hardcores are special. Particularly since Pellenera showed up.”

Mention of the enigmatic Nubian Pied Piper sent mystical frissons down Tug’s spine. The story of her origin lacked no complementary mystery or romance.

“It was a dark and stormy night. Really. About six months ago, sometime in May. Ozzie announced that he was gonna power up his brane-buster for the first time. Bunch of us gathered down in his lab around midnight. Boat was rocking like JFK trying to solve the Cuban Seafloor Colony Crisis. So Ozzie straps himself in and starts playing the keys of that electronic harmonium thingy that’s at the core of the device. Weirdest music you’ve ever heard. Flashing lights, burning smells, the sound of about a dozen popping components self-destructing simultaneously— Then the inside of the booth part of the gizmo goes all smoky-hazy-like, and out pops this naked African chick! She looks around for a few seconds, not scared, just amazed, says a few words no one understands, then runs off into the night!”

Tug’s erotic imagination supplied all too vividly the image of the naked ebony charms of Pellenera—conjured up a picture so distracting that he missed the next few words from Harmon Frawley.

“—Janey Vogelsang. She was the first one Pellenera led back here, a week later. Marcello named her that, by the way. Just means ‘black hide.’ And you’re, oh, about the tenth.”

“And she never speaks?”

“Not since that first night. She just plays that demon ocarina. You ever heard the like?”

“Never.”

Harmon scratched his manly chin. “Why she’s leading people here, how she chooses ’em—that’s anybody’s guess.”

“Does she live onboard?”

“Nope. Roams the city, so far as anyone can tell.”

And so Tug entered the society of the Tom Pudding as one cryptically anointed.

He came now to a darkened TV room, whose walls, floor and ceiling had been carpeted with heterogeneous scavenged remnants. An old console set dominated a couch on which were crowded Iona Draggerman, Jura Burris and Turk Vanson.

“Hey, Tug, join us! We’re watching Vajayjay and Badonkadonk!”

“It’s that episode where Vajayjay’s relatives visit from India and have to go on a possum hunt!”

The antics of Kaz’s animated Hindi cat and Appalachian mule, while generally amusing, held no immediate allure for Tug.

“Aren’t you guys playing the part of quarks tonight? Shouldn’t you be getting your costumes ready?”

“We’ve got hours yet!”

“We don’t dance every time Ozzie pulls our strings!”

Tug moved on, past various uncanny or domestic tableaux, including the always spooky incense-fueled devotional practice of Tatang, the mono-named shorebird from the sunken Kiribati Islands.

At last he found Sukey Damariscotta, sitting all bundled up and cross-legged in a director’s chair on deck, sketching trees upon the shoreline.

Only twenty-four, Sukey possessed a preternatural confidence derived from her autodidactic artistic prowess. Tug had never met anyone so capable of both meticulous fine art and fluent cartooning.

Sukey’s heritage included more Amerind blood than most other Americans possessed. In her, the old diffuse and diluted aboriginal strains absorbed by generations of colonists had recombined to birth a classic pre-Columbian beauty, all cheekbones, bronze skin and coal-black hair, styled somewhat incongruously in a Dead Rabbits tough-girl cut repopularized recently by pennywhistlers the Pogues.

Tug was more than a little in love with the talented and personable young woman, but had dared say nothing to her of his feelings so far.

Dropping down to the December-cold deck, Tug admired the drawing. “Sweet. I like the lines of that beech tree.”

Sukey accepted the praise without false humility or ego. “Thanks. Hey, remember those caricatures I was working on?”

Sukey’s cartoon captures of the cast of the ongoing Tom Pudding farcical drama managed to nail their personalities in a minimum of brisk, economical lines. Tug had been a little taken aback when she showed him his own depiction. Did he really look like such a craggy, aged misanthrope? But in the end, he had to confess the likeness.

“Sure. You added any new ones?”

Sukey tucked her charcoal stick behind one ear and flipped the pages of her sketchbook.

Tug confronted an image of Pellenera in the guise of the enormous demi-barebreasted Statue of Marianne on her island home in New York Harbor. The statue’s fixed pose of torch held aloft had been modified to feature Pellenera cradling all the infantilized Tom Pudding crew to her bosom.

When Tug had finished laughing, he said, “Hey, you ever gotten interested in bande dessinée? With an image like that, you’re halfway there.”

“Oh, I can’t tell a story to save my life.”

“Well, what if we collaborate? Here, give me that pad and a pencil, and I’ll rough something out.”

“What’s the story going to be about?”

“It’ll be about—about life in Carrollboro.”

Tug scrawled a three-by-three matrix of panels and, suddenly inspired, began populating them with stick figures and word balloons.

Sukey leaned in close, and Tug could smell intoxicating scents of raw woodsmoke and wild weather tangled in her hair.

9. “MORE OCARINA!”

Tug had never been subjected to a one-on-one confrontation with Oswaldo Vasterling before. The circumstances of their first dialogue added a certain surreal quality to what would, in the best of conditions, have been a bit of an unnerving trial.

The two men stood in a semi-secluded corner backstage at the Keith Vawter Memorial Auditorium, illuminated only by the dimmest of caged worklights that seemed to throw more shadows than photons. All around them was a chaos one could only hope would exhibit emergent properties soon.

Don Rippey was bellowing at people assembling a set: “Have any of you guys ever even seen a hammer before?”

Janey Vogelsang was trying to make adjustments to two costumes at once: “No, no, your arrow sash has to go counterclockwise if you’re a gluon!”

Turk Vanson was coaching a chorus of ocarina players. “Why the hell did I bother writing out the tablatures if you never even studied them?”

Crowds of other actors and dancers and musicians and crew-bosses and directors and makeup artists and stagehands and techies surged around these knots of haranguers and haranguees in the usual pre-chautauqua madness.

But Ozzie remained focused and indifferent to the tumult, in a most unnatural fashion. His lack of affect disturbed Tug. Despite Ozzie’s youth and a certain immaturity, he could appear ageless and deep as a well. Now, with Sphinxlike expression undermined only slightly by the juvenile wispy moustache, he had Tug pinned down with machine-gun questions.

“You’re sure you know all your cues? Did you replace those torn gels? What about that multiple spotlight effect I specified during the Boson Ballet?”

“It’s all under control, Ozzie. The last run-through was perfect.”

Oswaldo appeared slightly mollified, though still dubious. “You’d better be right. A lot is depending on this. And I won’t be here to supervise every minute of the production.”

“You won’t be? I thought this spectacle was going to be your shining moment. Where are you going?”

The pudgy genius realized he had revealed something secret, and showed a second’s rare disconcertment. “None of your business.”

Oswaldo Vasterling turned away from Tug, then suddenly swung back, exhibiting the most emotion Tug had yet witnessed in the enigmatic fellow.

“Gingerella, do you like this world?”

Tug’s turn to feel nonplussed. “Do I like this world? Well, yeah, I guess so…. It’s a pretty decent place. Things don’t always fall out in my favour, or the way I’d wish. I lost my job and my home just a month ago. But everyone has ups and downs, right? And besides, what choice do I have?”

Oswaldo stared intently at Tug. “I don’t think you really do care for this universe. I think you’re like me. You see, I know this world for what it is—a fallen place, a botch, an imperfect reflection of a higher reality and a better place. And as for choices—well, time will tell.”

On that note, Oswaldo Vasterling scuttled off like Professor T. E. Wogglebug in Baum’s The Vizier of Cockaigne.

Tug shook his head in puzzlement at this Gnostic Gnonsense, then checked his watch. He had time for one last curtain-parting peek out front.

The well-lighted auditorium was about a third full, with lots more people flowing in. Ozzie might make his nut after all, allowing him to continue with his crazy experiments….

Hey, a bunch of Tug’s old crowd! Pete, Pavel, Olive—essentially, everyone who had helped him move out of The Wyandot. Accidental manifestation, or solidarity with their old pal?

Wow, that move seemed ages ago. Tug experienced a momentary twinge of guilt. He really needed to reconnect with them all. That mass o-mail telling them he was okay and not to worry had been pretty bush league. But the Tom Pudding experience had utterly superseded his old life, as if he had moved to another country, leaving the patterns of decades to evanesce like phantoms upon the dawn…

Tug recognized Lee Smolin in another section of seats, surrounded by a claque of bearded nerds. The physicist’s phiz was familiar, the man having attained a certain public profile with his CBC documentaries such as The Universal Elegance…

The voice of Harmon Frawley, director-in-chief, rang out, “Places, everyone!”

Tug hastened back to his boards.

He found Sukey Damirscotta waiting there. She wore purple tights and leotard over bountiful curves. Tug’s knees weakened.

“Doing that bee-dee together this afternoon was lots of fun, Tug. Let’s keep at it! Now wish me luck! I’ve never portrayed a membrane before!”

Sukey planted a kiss on Tug’s cheek, then bounced off.

Glowing brighter than any floodlight, Tug turned to his controls. He tilted the monitor that showed him the stage to a better viewing angle.

And then “Mystery Mother and Her Magic Membranes” was underway.

Under blood-red spotlights Pudding person Pristina Immaculata appeared, raised from below through a trap, an immense waterfall of artificial hair concealing her otherwise abundant naked charms, Eve-style. Pristina’s magnificent voice, Tug had come to learn, made Yma Sumac’s seem a primitive instrument.

Warbling up and down the scale, Pristina intoned with hieratic fervour, “In the beginning was the Steinhardt-Turok model, and the dimensions were eleven…”

A rear-projection screen at the back of the stage lit up with one of Franchot Galliard’s B&W stag films, the infamous orgy scene from Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, involving Irish McCalla, Julie Newmar, Judy Holliday and Carole Landis.

Low-hanging clouds of dry-ice fog filled the stage. Tug’s hands played over his controls, evoking an empyrean purple realm. A dozen women cartwheeled across the boards. The imperturbable South-Pacifican Tatang wheeled out on a unicycle, bare-chested and juggling three machetes.

“I shift among loop gravity, vacuum fluctuations, and supergravity forever!”

After that, things got weird.

Tug was so busy at his boards that he paid little heed to the audience reaction, insofar as it even penetrated his remove. Retrospectively, he recalled hearing clapping, some catcalls, whistles and shouts of approval. All good reactions.

But then, at the start of the second hour, the riot began.

What triggered it seemed inconsequential to Tug: some bit of abstruse physics jargon, recited and then pantomimed by a bevy of dancers wearing fractal-patterned tights. But the combined assertion of their words and actions outraged Lee Smolin and his clan. No doubt Oswaldo Vasterling had penned the speech with just this result in mind.

On his monitor, Tug saw the performance come to a confused halt. He abandoned his station and raced out front.

The staff of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics had jumped to their feet and were shaking their fists at the stage, hollering insults.

Others in the audience told the dissenters to shut up and sit down. This enraged the unruly scientists further. Some bumrushed the stage, while others engaged in fisticuffs with the shushers. Gee, those guys could sure punch surprisingly hard for a bunch of electron-pushers.

The brawl spiralled outward from the principled nucleus, but without rhyme or reason. Soon the whole auditorium was churning with fighters and flighters.

Turk Vanson rushed onstage followed by his stalwart ocarina players. “We’ve got a fever, and my prescription is—more ocarina! Blow, guys, blow!”

The musicians launched into “Simple Gifts,” practically the nation’s second anthem ever since the tenure of Shaker Vice-President Thomas McCarthy during President Webster’s second term. But the revered music had no effect.

Someone uncorked a fire extinguisher or three, and Tug caught a blast of foam in the face.

Tug cleared his vision just in time to dodge a flying bottle that clipped Vanson’s head and sent him reeling, the projectile then tearing through the movie screen and passing right through the image of Bunny Yeager’s split beaver.

A woman collided with Tug and they both went smashing down. Sukey? No? Where was she? Was she okay… ?

Tatang rode over Tug’s legs with his unicycle, causing him to grunt in pain and to forget anything else.

Sirens obtruded over the screams….

At the adamant urging of Ozzie, Franchot Galliard reluctantly posted bail for all the Tom Pudding arrestees the next morning.

Tug met Sukey outside the police station. She had sheltered on a catwalk during the worst of the fracas, dropping sandbags on rogue quantum theoreticians.

Back on the barge, Tug took a shower, then went to one of the galleys to rustle up some breakfast.

A copy of that morning’s Whig-Chronicle lay on the table. The main headline, natch, concerned the debacle at the Vawter.

But buried inside the paper lurked an even more intriguing lede:

“Authorities report a break-in last night at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics….”

10. AMERICAN SPLENDOUR

Tug and Sukey worked on their bee-dee throughout December. Projected as an anthology of several tales, some just a page, some many pages, the nascent book chronicled a bare handful of anecdotes from Tug’s colourful years in Carrollboro. Events and characters came welling up from memory in a prodigious rush, producing laughter and incredulous head-shaking from his collaborator. He knew he had enough material for years of such books. And things always went on happening to him, too.

“You’ve led quite a life, Tug.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I have.”

Tug had never been happier, or felt more creative. He blessed the day miserable bastard Narcisse Godbout had kicked him out of his comfortable rut, the day Pete had pointed him toward the Tom Pudding, the night alluring Pellenera had approached him, and the day he had impulsively snatched Sukey’s sketchpad.

The cartooning team paused in their intense work only long enough to celebrate the birthday of Roger Williams on December 21st, along with the rest of the nation. Watching the traditional televised parades with Sukey, with their cheesy floats celebrating what had come to be known and worshipped as the Williams Creed, in all its archaically glorious phrasing—“No red man to be kept from our hearths and bedchambers; no black man to be imported to these shores against his will; no gods above the minds and hearts of mankind”—Tug experienced a simple national pride he had not felt in many years.

During these weeks, Tug and the rest of the barge’s crazyquilt crew braced themselves for some new manifestation of Oswaldo Vasterling’s brane-buster. The day after the catastrophic chautauqua, Ozzie had radiated a certain smug self-satisfaction at odds with his usual semblance of lordly indifference. Whatever he had purloined from the PITP must have promised immediate success. He immured himself in his lab, and the power levels aboard the craft wavered erratically, as evidenced by flickering brownouts from time to time, accompanied by noises and stinks.

But there had ensued no visible breakthroughs, no spontaneous generation of a second Pellenera, for instance, and Ozzie, when he finally showed himself to his followers, radiated a stony sense of humiliation and defeat.

By the end of January, Tug and Sukey had something they felt worthy of submission to a publisher. Tug found the contact info for an editor at Drawn & Quarterly, an imprint of the global Harmsworth Publishing empire. After querying, he received permission to submit, and off the package went, Sukey’s powerful black and white art deliberately left uncoloured.

Nothing to do but wait, now.

Deep into the bowels of one February night, Tug was awakened by distant music from beyond the spheres. Blanket wrapped haphazardly around himself, he stumbled up onto the frosted deck, finding himself surprisingly alone, as if the rest of the ship had been ensorcelled into fairytale somnolence.

Moonlight silvered the whole world. Pellenera—piping, argent eidolon—loomed atop the bank of the feeder canal. Tug shivered. Did she herald the arrival of a new recruit? Where was the guy?

But no newcomer emerged from among the winter-bare branches. Pellenera seemed intent merely on bleeding out her heart through the ocarina, as if seeking to convey an urgent message to someone.

Tug’s mind drowned in the music. He seemed to be seeing the world through Pellenera’s eyes, gazing down at himself on the deck. Was she tapping his optic nerves, seeing herself on the shore? That music—

Tug had a sudden vision of the Nubian woman, dancing naked save for—

—a skirt fashioned of bananas?

The music stopped. Pellenera vanished.

What the hell had all that been about?

An o-mail response from Drawn & Quarterly came in March, just as spring arrived.

Tug rushed back to the Tom Pudding with an o-café printout of the message.

Sukey Damariscotta was playing a videogame with Janey Vogelsang when Tug tracked her down: Spores of Myst. He hustled her away from Janey, to a quiet corner, then bade her read the printout.

“Oh, Tug, this is wonderful! We’ve done it!”

“I can’t believe it!”

“Me neither!”

Tug grabbed Sukey, hugged her close, kissed her passionately and wildly lips to lips.

Hands on Tug’s chest, Sukey pushed back, broke his embrace.

“What are you doing?”

“Sukey, I— You’ve gotta know by now—”

“Know what?” Her face registered distaste, as if she had been handed a slimy slug. “Oh, no, Tug, you can’t imagine us hooking up, can you? I like you, sure, a lot. I respect your talent. But you’re way too old….”

Time must’ve crept along somehow in its monotonous, purposeless, sempiternal fashion, although Tug couldn’t have testified to that reality. All he knew was that in some manner he had crossed blocks of Carrollboro to stand outside The Wyandot. His old residence of thirty years’ habitation was garlanded with scaffolding, its plastic-membraned windows so many blank, unseeing eyes, unbreachable passages to a vanished era, a lost youth.

In the end, he returned to the Tom Pudding.

What choice did he have in this fallen, inhospitable world?

Sukey acted friendly toward him, even somewhat intimate. But Tug knew that they would never relate the same way again, and that their collaboration was over, whatever the fate of their one and only book.

The voice of Ozzie Vasterling, when broadcast through the intercom system of the Tom Pudding—a system no one prior to this moment had even suspected was still active—resembled that of the Vizier of Cockaigne in the 1939 film version of that classic, as rendered by the imperious Charles Coburn.

“Attention, attention! Everyone report to my lab—on the double!”

Some folks were missing, ashore on their individual business. But Ozzie’s lab soon filled up with two dozen souls, Tug among them.

Weeks ago, Tug might have been as excited as the others gathered here. But since Sukey’s rebuff, life had lost its savour. What miracle could restore that burnish? None…

But yet—

Pellenera stood before the brane-buster, looking as out-of-place as a black panther in a taxi. Imagine a continent full of such creatures! Ozzie sat behind the keys of his harmonium. The brane-buster hummed and sparkled.

Ozzie could hardly speak. “Vibrations! It’s all the way the invisible strings vibrate! I only had to pay attention to her! Watch!”

He nodded to the Nubian, and she began to play her ocarina, as Ozzie pumped the harmonium attachment.

In the cabinet of the brane-buster, what could only be paradoxically described as a coruscating static vortex blossomed. Gasps from the watchers—even from sulky Tug.

With a joyous primal yawp, Pellenera hurled herself into the cabinet, still playing, and was no more.

The vortex lapsed into non-being as well.

Someone asked, “Is that the end?”

“Ha! Do you think I’m an idiot! I recorded every last note!”

Pellenera’s looped song started up again, and the vortex resumed.

Everyone waited.

Time stretched like the silent heist scene in Hitchcock’s Rififi.

Pellenera popped out of the cabinet, carrying something concealed in the crook of her arm, but naked as water herself.

Even from the edge of the crowd, Tug noticed that her naked back was inexplicably criss-crossed with a latticework of long antique gnarly scars, and he winced.

Revealed, her burden was one perfect golden Cavendish banana.

She smiled, and took several steps forward, the spectators parting before her like grasses beneath a breeze, until she came face to face with Tug.

And she handed the banana to him.